Editor's Choice

Banks work to make foreign exchange less foreign to clients

In these rocky economic times, more U.S. companies are looking to hedge their exposure to currency swings and protect their margins, The Wall Street Journal reports, and KeyCorp and PNC Financial Services are among the banks helping clients do just that.
Companies big and small are dabbling in so-called “foreign-exchange” transactions in which they buy options to protect against big currency fluctuations, The Journal says. In doing so, they are “dabbling in an arena trod by experienced currency traders at banks, major corporations and governments,” according to the newspaper.
“Driving down the dollar has been driving people crazy," says Grafton Willey, associate trustee and a former chair of the National Small Business Association. He tells The Journal he is seeing more small business owners who want to learn about currency markets. The paper notes that foreign-exchange volume “has risen steadily in recent months due to increased trading by professionals and intrepid investors alike.”
At Cleveland-based Key, “the demand for knowledge about foreign exchange has been so great from its corporate clients that the regional bank rolled out a national program last year, seeking to educate its clients in ‘FX Bootcamps,' " The Journal reports.
Pittsburgh-based PNC, which has a big presence in Cleveland, has been conducting similar "FX 101" sessions, in rented hotel conference rooms and office branches, since at least the late-1990s, a bank executive tells the newspaper.

The stars their destination

Marc G. Millis, head of the Tau Zero Foundation in Cleveland, might be close to seeing a longtime dream realized.
The New York Times reports that Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, “plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.”
The grant will be awarded on Nov. 11. It's planned “as the culmination of a year-long Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel,” the newspaper reports.
The Tau Zero Foundation was founded by Mr. Millis, who directed propulsion research at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, to encourage work on “practical interstellar flight.” The Times notes that Mr. Millis last year calculated that it would be at least 200 years before society had the energy resources to send 500 people out of the solar system.
“A variety of propulsion schemes have their fans and might prevail the long span between now and launch day — a problem that Mr. Millis terms ‘incessant obsolescence,' ” according to The Times. “Among them are gigantic sails pushed by sunlight or by powerful microwave beams and ion drives in which beams of high energy particles do the propelling.”

This and that

No need to suffer in silence: A Cleveland Clinic doctor is quoted in this Reuters story about the role depression might have played in the recent deaths of three North American athletes.
National Hockey League player Rick Rypien, 27, was found dead in his apartment on Monday. Reuters says the coroner “has yet to determine the cause of death, but Rypien had grappled with depression for a decade, a disease that had threatened to derail his NHL career several times.”
Fellow NHL player Derek Boogaard, 28, was found dead in his apartment in May. His death “was deemed an accident caused by a lethal cocktail of alcohol and painkillers,” Reuters notes. U.S. freestyle skier Jeret 'Speedy' Peterson, a silver medalist in the aerials at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics who had admitted to problems with alcohol and depression, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot in Utah.
"I think there remains a significant stigma (about depression) in the general population but more so in the professional athlete," Dr. Donald Malone, head of the Psychiatric Neuromodulation Center at the Cleveland Clinic, tells Reuters.
"There's an aspect to it in the athletes that they want to keep it hidden,” he says. "Athletes are not immune. They can suffer silently."
On the Bachmann bandwagon: Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is among three well-known conservatives who have organized a “super PAC” to help U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann win the Republican presidential nomination, according to this item from The Washington Post.
The Group is known as Citizens for a Working America. It was formed in fall 2010 “and spent more than $250,000 to defeat former South Carolina Democratic Rep. John Spratt,” The Post reports. It now will be turned entirely to aid Rep. Bachmann.
The newspaper notes that under Federal Election Commission rules, super PACs “can raise unlimited donations but have to report the identity of their contributors and detail their expenditures.”
The elements of style: The Wall Street Journal profiles Cleveland native and Hathaway Brown graduate Jenné Lombardo, who today is being named “fashion director” for the chic W Hotels chain.
“Fashion directors aren't common at hotels, but Ms. Lombardo's job is more about making productive connections than about choosing clothes,” The Journal reports. “For the past year, she has challenged management company IMG's iron grip on New York's runway shows by hosting a stream of fashion-week events for the MAC & Milk alliance, a partnership of the cosmetics brand and the photography studio.”
Ms. Lombardo, 34, “is best known for forging a high-profile relationship between Lady Gaga and MAC cosmetics several years ago, when she worked at the cosmetics company,” The Journal says.
But the mother of three retains a Midwest sensibility.
“We're not fancy,” she says of her family. “We're from Cleveland.”